Exposed by Andy Baio. Unfortunately, WordPress honcho Matt Mullenweg is on vacation. It only took a few hours for Google to revoke the PageRank for all their scammy “articles”, and Yahoo followed suit a few hours later.

Wednesday, 30 March 2005

Starting in BBEdit 8.1, the Next/Previous Document commands work in most-recently-used order; to switch them to use the order in which documents are displayed in the drawer (which is how it worked in 8.0), quit BBEdit, then issue this command in a Terminal window (all on one line):

Tim Bray published a look at the aggregator market share for his feed at Ongoing; NetNewsWire’s share is simply staggering when you consider that it only runs on Mac OS X. No other desktop app comes close.

You know how you can use Command-` and Command-Shift-` to cycle through the open windows in most Mac apps? For some reason, Word 2004 uses Cmd-F6 and Cmd-Shift-F6 for these commands. Dan Sugalski shows how to fix it. This would be helpful if I actually ever used Word.

Tuesday, 22 March 2005

Jon Johansen has reverse-engineered the encryption iTunes 4.7 uses to communicate to the iTunes Music Store, allowing his PyMusique app to work again. PyMusique is a thorn in Apple’s side, because it allows one purchase music from ITMS without DRM, taking advantage of the fact that it’s iTunes that adds the DRM to your purchased music, not the ITMS itself.

I’m not sure what Apple can do here, because suing isn’t going to make this source code go away.

Monday, 21 March 2005

Includes a Safari/Web Kit update to address the IDN domain-name-spoofing issue. Judging by the description, it’s a good solution: by default, they disallow Roman-look-alike scripts. This allows non-Roman Unicode characters in domain names (say, for Asian languages), but disallows the use of Unicode trickery to use a domain name that looks like, say, “paypal.com”, but which really contains one or more obscure Roman Unicode characters that just happen to look like ‘a’, ‘l’, ‘p’, or ‘y’.

It’s sad how few fonts a web designer can count on today. The six new screen fonts from Microsoft do look good — here’s to hoping they make them freely available to other platforms to spread their adoption. One could argue that making these fonts available to Mac and Linux users would be good for Windows users, too, as it would make it more likely that web designers would specify them in their pages.

Open source re-implementation of Ta-Da List, written in Java. Has inspired a bit of a pissing contest regarding the relative merits of Java + RIFE vs. Ruby + Rails for web app development. Cf. (a) Bla-Bla List developer Geert Bevin, who admits that he undertook the project specifically to prove that Ruby on Rails isn’t all that revolutionary; (b) David Heinemeier Hansson, developer of both the Rails framework and Ta-Da List app, who picks a few (possibly contrived?) examples that make Bla-Bla’s Java code look exceedingly verbose compared to Ta-Da’s Ruby.

Language/framework religion aside, it’s also interesting to note, when comparing the two, that Ta-Da’s UI is Ajax-ish (HTML + JavaScript), whereas Bla-Bla’s is Flash (by way of the Laszlo toolkit). Ta-Da’s UI feels snappier to me, overall, but Bla-Bla’s use of drag-and-drop makes reordering list items much easier than in Ta-Da.

Paul Graham and a few friends have set up a program to fund new startups over the summer. They’re offering roughly $6,000 per person, and will take care of the paperwork hassles (articles of incorporation, employment agreements, etc.).

A Google Labs production: icons for each of the various Google services (web search, image search, news, Froogle, etc.) which magnify when you mouse over them, a la the Mac OS X Dock. Google engineer Chikai Ohazama writes about how it came to be at the Google Blog. (Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

Monday, 14 March 2005

12-minute segment on “This American Life” on the secret history of Graphing Calculator — the app created by an engineer who kept sneaking into Apple to work on the app, even after his contract with the company had expired. (Via Aaron Swartz via email.)

Saturday, 12 March 2005

Drunkenblog runs down the evidence proving that CherryOS — a $50 PowerPC emulator for Windows — is a rip-off of the GPL open source PearPC project. This isn’t “hmm, looks like it might be a rip-off” evidence; this is incontrovertible smoking gun evidence. What a bunch of dicks.

Friday, 11 March 2005

The judge said that Apple can go ahead and obtain records from Nfox, the e-mail service provider to Mac enthusiast site PowerPage. In the ruling, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg ruled that Apple’s interests in protecting its trade secrets outweighed the public interest in the information.

Choice quote from the judge:

“But an interested public is not the same as the public interest.”

And I can’t believe CNet is still calling them “fan sites”.

[Update: CNet has made the full ruling available for download in Microsoft Word format here. Even better, The Mac Observer has it as a PDF.]

Wednesday, 9 March 2005

Someone figured out that students applying to leading business schools — including Harvard’s — could check on the status of their applications simply by truncating the URLs to the online application service used by the schools. Harvard has deemed this “hacking”, and is denying admission to those who used the trick. I deem it a crappy web application written by incompetent programmers.

Tim Bray responds to the growing mainstream media meme that “people are getting fired for their blogs”, and argues the opposite — that for most people, writing a weblog is good for your career.

Blogging clearly isn’t going to help that proportion of
people who aren’t really up to their job, or who are
prone to inarticulate flaming, or both. But then, those
people tend to have career problems anyhow. Put it
another way: not blogging won’t protect you from
career-limiting moves, and if blogging provokes one,
well, you were probably going to do it anyhow.

Long-time Mac developer Alco Blom (URL Manager Pro, Web Confidential) is the winner of the second round of Apple’s Dashboard Widget Contest. His winning widget is an SMS text-messenger that integrates with Address Book.

Tuesday, 8 March 2005

The cheapest models, which come with a 256MB flash memory chip, will start at $90 and run up to about $200. The electronics conglomerate hopes that pricing will address complaints that its products are overpriced.

Fat chance of that, given that you can buy an iPod Shuffle with twice the
storage for only $99. Apple is just kicking Sony’s ass here.

[Updated March 9: The wire services originally reported the 256 MB Walkman was going to cost $132, not $90. Here’s the correction from the AP. These new flash-memory Walkmen still compare poorly against the iPod Shuffle, however.]

They claim to hold a patent that “governs the verification of a single user before permitting the user to download tracks” according to CNet’s report. In other words, they’ve “patented” authentication via username and password for music downloads. CNet’s report also claims the company wants 12 percent of iTunes and iPod sales, but I fail to see how this patent applies to the iPod. I mean, why not sue for 12 percent of Mac sales, too, if they’re going to claim profits from any device that can play the tracks purchased via a method that infringes on their so-called patent?

Sunday, 6 March 2005

Saturday, 5 March 2005

Despite the “preliminary” ruling in Apple’s favor, the judge in Apple’s subpoena case against Think Secret, PowerPage, and Apple Insider did not issue a ruling at yesterday’s hearing. (Via Drunkenblog.)

Amy Hoy on getting started with Ruby on Rails. Sort of a “getting your head wrapped around the basic concepts” overview. Her “24(slash7)” weblog might be worth subscribing to if you’re interested in Rails development.

Friday, 4 March 2005

LinkBack is an open source framework for Mac OS X, produced by Nisus, The Omni Group, and Blacksmith. The idea is that it provides something similar to the old Publish-and-Subscribe mechanism from System 7, where one app can embed the content from another in a frame, and you can double-click the embedded content to open it for editing in the original app. E.g. you could put an OmniGraffle illustration in your Nisus Writer Express document, then later on double-click the graphic to open it in OmniGraffle for editing.

It’ll be interesting to see if something like this can take off, given that it’s a community project rather than an official Cocoa framework from Apple.

(It’s also a weird name — when I think “link”, I think web. My first thought was that “LinkBack” was some sort of alternative to TrackBack.)

In a case with implications for the freedom to blog, a San Jose judge tentatively ruled Thursday that Apple Computer can force three online publishers to surrender the names of confidential sources who disclosed information about the company’s upcoming products.

This is an important case, and if it stands, a significant victory for Apple. But it is not about “the freedom to blog”. It’s only about the freedom to republish trade secrets regarding upcoming Apple products.

Thursday, 3 March 2005

Amit Singh has written an in-depth analysis of the new Sudden Motion Sensors in the latest line-up of PowerBooks. It’s the motion-detection circuit that’s designed to raise the head of your hard disk if it detects that the machine has been dropped. At the end of the piece, Singh mentions that he’s been working for the past year on an in-depth technical book on Mac OS X’s architecture; considering the quality of his “What Is Mac OS X”, it could be a great book. (Via Waxy.org.)

Full-time Mac developer, will be working on Camino, Thunderbird, and some cross-platform browser called Firefox. Aas states that one of his goals is to get Gecko to switch from the old QuickDraw graphics routines to Quartz, which should help both performance and appearance. (Via Jon Hicks.)

In the first case of its kind, EFF will argue that these online reporters’ confidential sources and unpublished material are protected by both the reporter’s shield in the California Constitution and the reporter’s privilege protected by the federal First Amendment. The hearing will be Friday, March 4, at 10:00 a.m. at the Santa Clara County Superior Court, 191 North First Street, San Jose. Press are welcome to attend.

Wednesday, 2 March 2005

Timothy Appnel in praise of SQLite as a back-end data store for Movable Type. Hard to argue with; it’s definitely better than Berkeley DB, and MySQL is overkill for most MT installations. Appnel also mentions that the new version of the DBI::SQLite Perl module on CPAN is a big improvement over previous versions.

Tuesday, 1 March 2005

Remember Tim Bucher? The guy who was promoted to head of Macintosh Hardware Engineering but then left the company under strange circumstances last November? Well, he was in fact fired, and now he’s suing Apple for wrongful termination, alleging the company “terminated him without cause and failed to pay all due compensation, including restricted stock grants and a bonus”, according to Ina Fried’s report for CNet News.

If you read between the lines in Fried’s report, the gist of it seems to be that Bucher took on too many responsibilities, and that Steve Jobs and Tim Cook thought he was cracking.

Two years ago, Andrew Pontious and Mac Murrett created a Rendezvous-enabled distributed build system for Project Builder, which they intended to sell for $450 a seat. Before they could ship it, however, Apple announced Xcode, which contained its own (free) distributed build system. They’ve now released their system, NetBuild, as open source.

New utility from Rogue Amoeba Software streams audio from any application to an AirPort Express (by default, AirPort Express only accepts music streamed from iTunes). $20 introductory price for the month of March; $25 thereafter.